The second novel by the acclaimed author of Gabriel’s Story, Walk Through Darkness is a story of history infused by myth, the intense narrative of an escaped slave trying to reunite with his pregnant wife.

Walk Through Darkness is the story of two very different men, each on a quest, both tied together by a history of remorse, jealousy, and a love that crosses the barriers of race during the time of slavery.

William, a fugitive slave from Maryland, is driven by two powerful needs--to find his wife, Dover, who is pregnant with his child, and to live as a free man. He undertakes the treacherous journey north to restore meaning to his life, putting him at odds with the law and the sentiments of a nation. Morrison, who fled a painful youth in Scotland, had once hoped to establish a new life in America with his brother, but the unforeseen realities of immigrant life drove them apart.

As David Anthony Durham traces the physical and spiritual journeys of William, Dover, and Morrison he captures in rich, evocative detail the events and the landscape of America just before the turmoil of the Civil War. Interweaving tragedy and hardship with a profound understanding of enduring love and the desire for freedom. Walk Through Darkness is a complex story that is uniquely American, reflecting the tortured nature of the country’s bloodlines and uncovering the deep bonds, and wounds, that exist across racial lines. This is a well-wrought work of "fiction in history" that follows two very different American men's paths to freedom, and places a difficult part of our nation's history under a magnifying glass to search for something beyond pain. In the end, it also presents a new possibility for healing -- for the characters, and for the larger racial divide that still haunts the United States.

Building on the strengths of his extraordinary debut, Durham opens the reader's eyes anew to the eternal odyssey to find a home and identity in America.

Groups with this in collection

NY Times Notable Book Club (67)